CLAUSE XV
Notes on the Creed
The three paragraphs correspond to the three aspects or Personifications of Deity which have most impressed mankind,— The Creating and Sustaining. The Sympathising and Suffering. The Regenerating and Sanctifying. The first of the three clauses tries to indicate briefly the cosmic, as well as the more humanly intelligible, attributes of Deity; and to suggest an idea of creation appropriate to the doctrine of Divine Immanence, as opposed to the anthropomorphic notion of manufacture. The idea of evolution by guiding and controlling Purpose is suggested, as well as the vital conception of Fatherly Love.
In the second paragraph, Time and Place are explicitly mentioned in order to emphasise the historical and human aspect of the Christian manifestation of Godhead. This aspect is essential and easy to appreciate, though its idealisation and full interpretation are difficult. The step, from the bare historic facts to the idealisation of the Fourth Gospel, has been the work of the Church, in the best sense of that word, aided by the doctrines of the Logos and of Immanence, elaborated by Philosophy. It all hangs together, when properly grasped, and constitutes a luminous conception; but the light thus shed upon the nature of Deity must not blind our eyes to the simple human facts from which it originally emanated. The clear and undoubted fact is that the founder of the Christian religion lived on this earth a blameless life, taught and helped the poor who heard him gladly, gathered to himself a body of disciples with whom he left a message to mankind, and was put to death as a criminal blasphemer, at the instigation of mistaken priests in the defence of their own Order and privileges.
This monstrous wrong is regarded by some as having unconsciously completed the salvation of the race; because of the consummation of sacrifice, and because of the suffering of the innocent, which it involved. The Jewish sacrificial system, and the priestly ceremony of the scapegoat, seem to lead up to that idea; which was elaborated by St. Paul with immense genius, and taught by S. Augustine.
Others attach more saving efficacy to the life, the example, and the teachings, as recorded in the Gospels; and all agree that they are important.
But in fact the whole is important: and at the foot of the Cross there has been a perennial experience of relief and renovation. Sin being the sense of imperfection, disunion, lack of harmony, the struggle among the members that St. Paul for all time expressed;—there is usually associated with it a sense of impotence, a recognition of the impossibility of achieving peace and unity in one’s own person, a feeling that aid must be forthcoming from a higher source. It is this feeling which enables the spectacle of any noble self-sacrificing human action to have an elevating effect, it is this which gropes after the possibilities of the highest in human nature, it is a feeling which for large tracts of this planet has found its highest stimulus and completest satisfaction in the life and death of Christ.
The willingness of such a Being to share our nature, to live the life of a peasant, and to face the horrible certainty of execution by torture, in order personally to help those whom he was pleased to call his brethren, is a race-asset which, however masked and overlaid with foreign growths, yet gleams through every covering and suffuses the details of common life with fragrance.